However, Ranby, house-surgeon to the king, and a favourite of Lord Hervey’s, assuring him that a cordial with this name or that name was mere quackery, some usquebaugh was given instead, but was rejected by the queen soon afterwards.  At last Raleigh’s cordial was administered, but also rejected about an hour afterwards.  Her fever, after taking Raleigh’s cordial, was so much increased, that she was ordered instantly to be bled.

Then, even, the queen never disclosed the fact that could alone dictate the course to be pursued.  George II., with more feeling than judgment, slept on the outside of the queen’s bed all that night; so that the unhappy invalid could get no rest, nor change her position, not daring to irritate the king’s temper.

The next day the queen said touchingly to her gentle, affectionate daughter, herself in declining health, ’Poor Caroline! you are very ill, too:  we shall soon meet again in another place.’

Meantime, though the queen declared to every one that she was sure nothing could save her, it was resolved to hold a levee.  The foreign ministers were to come to court, and the king, in the midst of his real grief, did not forget to send word to his pages to be sure to have his last new ruffles sewed on the shirt he was to put on that day; a trifle which often, as Lord Hervey remarks, shows more of the real character than events of importance, from which one frequently knows no more of a person’s state of mind than one does of his natural gait from his dancing.

Lady Sundon was, meantime, ill at Bath, so that the queen’s secret rested alone in her own heart.  ‘I have an ill,’ she said, one evening, to her daughter Caroline, ‘that nobody knows of.’  Still, neither the princess nor Lord Hervey could guess at the full meaning of that sad assertion.

The famous Sir Hans Sloane was then called in; but no remedy except large and repeated bleedings were suggested, and blisters were put on her legs.  There seems to have been no means left untried by the faculty to hasten the catastrophe—­thus working in the dark.

The king now sat up with her whom he had so cruelly wounded in every nice feeling.  On being asked, by Lord Hervey, what was to be done in case the Prince of Wales should come to inquire after the queen, he answered in the following terms, worthy of his ancestry—­worthy of himself.  It is difficult to say which was the most painful scene, that in the chamber where the queen lay in agony, or without, where the curse of family dissensions came like a ghoul to hover near the bed of death, and to gloat over the royal corpse.  This was the royal dictum:—­’If the puppy should, in one of his impertinent airs of duty and affection, dare to come to St. James’s, I order you to go to the scoundrel, and tell him I wonder at his impudence for daring to come here; that he has my orders already, and knows my pleasure, and bid him go about his business; for his poor mother is not in a condition to see him act his false, whining, cringing tricks now, nor am I in a humour to bear with his impertinence; and bid him trouble me with no more messages, but get out of my house.’